India gets its first Hindi e-commerce site

New Delhi, July 16 (IANS) The country got its first e-commerce site in Hindi Wednesday. Ezeego1.com, the country’s first meta search travel site, launched its new Indian langauge window for the vast Hindi-speaking travel market so that customers in the tier II and tier III cities can book flight tickets on domestic circuits. Unveiling the new vertical, hindi-ezeego1.com, here, the chief operating officer of Ezeego1.com, Neelu Singh, said there was a huge market in north India that was comfortable with both English and Hindi, but preferred transacting their business in Hindi.

“The site has been designed specially for them,” Singh said. She cited herself as one of those who was comfortable with Hindi despite knowing English.

Singh said Hindi was the second most preferred language in India today. “There are a very few multilingual and bi-lingual sites today. However, most of these sites offer content, but do not allow transaction,” Singh told reporters. According to her, a Hindi e-commerce site would inspire confidence among customers.

The entire booking process right up to the payment option on Ezeego’s portal is in Hindi. And the target audience at the inception is the vast populace in the income group of Rs.300,000 to Rs.500,000 per annum in towns like Jaipur, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bhopal and Indore.

“The inspiration behind the Hindi portal was our call centre where most users requisition support services in Hindi. They would look for somehow who could explain ravel-related queries in Hindi. We realised that there was a huge market waiting to be tapped,” Singh said.

Studies by the government show that the number of internet users in India stood at 32 million in January 2008. The country has more than three million broadband connections and 40 percent of this market is in the tier II cities.

Singh said Ezeego has designed a marketing and communications strategy to coincide with the launch. The site, which was now offering domestic flight bookings, would gradually introduce many more products such as holidays, insurance, cruises and hotel bookings in Hindi too. The site expects the Hindi portal to push up its business by 30 percent.

Ezeego will follow up its Hindi portal with sites in Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil in a year.